LOT 013

ARCA CGP CSGA CSPWC OSA P11
1909 - 1977
Canadian

Orange Totem
acrylic on canvas
on verso signed, titled, dated November 1973 and inscribed "Top" (with arrow) / "Toronto" / “Acrylic Polymer W.B”
87 x 62 in, 221 x 157.5 cm

Estimate: $250,000 - $350,000 CAD

Sold for: $301,250

Preview at:

PROVENANCE
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, April 1974
Ronald Baker, Toronto, July 1974
Malcolm Fisher, 2019
Private Collection, Toronto

EXHIBITED
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Jack Bush: Recent Paintings, 1974


In the spring of 1974, Orange Totem made its debut in a solo exhibition titled Jack Bush: Recent Paintings at David Mirvish Gallery. By summertime, the painting was acquired by a private collector, who kept it for 45 years. Orange Totem is, as its title indicates, a part of Jack Bush’s Totem series, which totals 21 paintings made between 1973 and 1974. These paintings are prized by their owners. Remarkably, the majority of the Totem paintings (16 out of 21) were retained by their private owners for at least 30 years before they changed hands, if at all.

Characterized by flat sections of bold colour stacked one atop the other, each painting in the Totem series is highly original. Orange Totem features shapes of colour that have migrated to produce an adjacent smaller stack of colours, making it the first side-by-side or double totem in the series. Rather than form or symbology, Bush was concerned with achieving the most effective syntax or arrangement of colour in each Totem painting. Akin to Hans Hofmann, whose rectilinear blocks of colour emphasize the surface of the abstract composition, Bush maintains a sense of active tension between his high-key colour combinations. In Orange Totem, the intensity of colour is pumped up by the sharp contrast between the hot and cold colours: orange against blue and pink against green. As Roald Nasgaard observed in his review of the exhibition of Bush’s recent work in 1974, the colours present in his new work could “exert themselves with the full sonority of the mid-sixties pictures which perhaps until now have not been surpassed.”[1]

The coexistence of rough edges and hard edges on these flat figures of colour work similarly as reminders of the real subject of the picture: paint on canvas. Paradoxically, these colourful swatches illustrate painterly gestures without indulging in the action of painterly gesture. The same challenge is met with the mottled ground. Bush had first produced a mottled ground in 1969, when he aimed to replicate the surface of a rock. This background teases the tenets of post-painterly abstraction on two levels: it achieves the look of texture without actually being textured (depth is denied), and these deceiving variations of dark, light and mid-tone browns are endlessly varied without a single flick of the wrist. Bush rolled on these grounds after dipping his roller into unmixed paint. Any gestural mark made in this process was a purposeful product of chance, the purpose being to exclude the old value of virtuosity in painting.

Bush had been a painter since the late 1920s but, by 1973, he was a recognized and respected leader amongst American abstract painters. Curator Kenworth Moffett had organized a survey of Bush’s mature paintings that opened as the inaugural exhibition for the new contemporary art wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in February 1972. Moffett’s preface to the exhibition catalogue indicates the positive reception of Bush’s work abroad, as he stated:

From a historical point of view Bush’s most recent paintings seem to synthesize the kind of graphic improvisations found in Miró and Gottlieb with the American color painting. They also recall certain aspects of Matisse, especially in their color and in their handling of figure-ground relationships. But beyond all comparisons and influences, they are the work of a very original artistic personality. They show that assurance and freedom of a major painter at the height of his powers. [2]

Painted just a matter of months after Moffett’s praise was published, Orange Totem is a testament to Bush’s late-career confidence and innovative spirit.

We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners, director of the Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné, contributor to the Bush retrospective originating at the National Gallery of Canada in 2014, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Art History, for contributing the above essay.

This work will be included in Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.

1. Roald Nasgaard, “Toronto: Jack Bush at David Mirvish,” Arts Magazine 48, no. 9 (June 1974): 70.

2. Kenworth Moffett, Jack Bush Exhibition for the Inauguration of the New Contemporary Gallery (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1972), exhibition catalogue, unpaginated.


Estimate: $250,000 - $350,000 CAD

All prices are in Canadian Dollars


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